ShadE: 100% Wooden Sunglasses by Qoowl

Taking a new approach to eyewear, Qoowl has designed the first pair of sunglasses made from 100% wood. How, you say? Well, the Qoowl designers took on the challenge of creating a functional product from a single sheet of plywood while experimenting with the properties of the material. This lead to the ShadE sunglasses, which only weigh 14 grams (or 3/10 of a pound)!

The sheet of plywood is laser cut to notch out the slots in the design. After that, each pair is sanded and bent at the sides so they fit and stay on your face.

You can even fit them over your regular glasses!

Following along the no waste philosophy of the sunglasses, the packaging is made from a single sheet of cardboard which folds up to create a box.

7 Comments

Craig on 06.10.2014 at 11:35 AM

I’m sorry but as fun a design experiment as this might be, promoting the use of sunglasses that have zero UV protection is irresponsible to say the least!

If these do in fact shade the eyes and reduce the brightness of the light you may even find that the wearer’s pupils dilate and let in more harmful UV-B rays than if they were wearing no sunglasses at all.

It is of vital importance that we teach our future generations the benefits of protecting their sight and hearing. The only saving grace is that they can be worn over regular glasses so I suggest that if you want ‘the look’ put them over a pair of inexpensive sunglasses with an anti UV-B coating.

It would be the responsible thing for the makers to put such a warning on their website.

First of all thank you for your remark. Indeed it is important to teach our future generations the benefits of good protection. That’s why we have never communicated that our glasses protect against UV light. On the other hand you are right that we didn’t communicate that they don’t protect against UV light.